


Little Gestures

by Scrawlers



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:08:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrawlers/pseuds/Scrawlers
Summary: Yuugi has a beyond awful day, starting from his morning commute and running all the way through to his evening one. Fortunately, Jounouchi always knows just what to do to help him feel better.





	Little Gestures

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few years ago, but in light of Tumblr being . . . Tumblr, I've decided to archive everything here, just in case.
> 
> This takes place when Yuugi and Jounouchi are in their mid-to-late twenties—around 25/26 or so—and own their condo. You know, the usual.

From the moment he woke up, Yuugi knew the day was going to be terrible.

There was nothing special about the day—nothing hanging over his head aside from the dull grey of the sky, which was just overcast enough to block out the sun, but not threaten the city with an impending downpour. But from the moment he woke up Yuugi felt a sense of dread digging into his shoulders, a heavy weight in his chest that urged him to throw the covers over his head and just stay home. He couldn’t, he knew—his company had a new game in development and he had a deadline to meet—but that didn’t do anything to help dislodge the feeling of impending doom looming on the horizon.

And from the second he made it to the train station so he could make his daily commute to work, Yuugi saw that his sense foreboding was completely founded.

For while things had been normal, if not tinged by a dismal feeling, up until that point, when Yuugi reached the train station he found that the line he normally took to work was undergoing emergency maintenance, which meant that he had to take a detour. The deteour, Yuugi noted with a groan, would take him off-course by at least fifteen minutes—and that was fifteen minutes that he couldn’t afford to spare given his penchant of sleeping in until the last minute (and several minutes past the last minute this particular morning, given how reluctant he had been to get out of bed). His boss wouldn’t flay him for being late because of a train delay, Yuugi knew, but he would still expect Yuugi to stay later to make up for lost time—well, that, or skip his lunch. Neither possibility seemed particularly thrilling, but as Yuugi called his boss to let him know, he figured he could maybe make up the time by eating lunch at his desk instead. Maybe, Yuugi thought, this was what had left him with a heavy sense of disquiet that morning: a problem easily solved by multitasking through his lunch hour. Maybe once he made it into work, his day would improve.

It didn’t.

Perhaps it was because of his preoccupation with how awful he felt his day was going to be, or perhaps it was because he was distracted by thoughts of the new game he was working on and all of the work he still had yet to do, but whatever the reason, Yuugi forgot that he—along with his boss and an English translator—were supposed to be having a conference call with an overseas publisher that morning in order to discuss the possibility of publishing games Yuugi had worked on in North American and PAL markets. Arriving at work late—five minutes into when the meeting was supposed to start—was bad enough, but it was made worse when, having entirely forgotten what he was actually supposed to be doing, Yuugi just went to his desk to get started on the work he had to do for the day. It wasn’t until one of his team members leaned over the cubicle wall and asked, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in that meeting?” that Yuugi (after a second or two of blank staring) remembered where he was supposed to be, and as a result he didn’t make it to the meeting until ten minutes after it had started.

Those ten minutes turned into thirteen minutes when he realized he had left all of the notes and documentation that he needed to share with the overseas publishers back at his desk, and had to go back and get them.

After fumbling his way through the meeting (which, thankfully, didn’t end in complete failure on their part to secure a partnership with an overseas publisher, but did end with his boss chiding him for being unprepared), Yuugi—determined to at least try and wrangle the day back under control—returned to his desk so he could get started on the programming he had to get done for the day. With this particular game he had a small team of programmers he was working with, and while sometimes it was a little difficult with each of them writing and working with different branches of the code at the same time (especially since a few of his team members were on the other side of the office), for the most part they were able to keep things organized via a chat system they had set up between their workstations. By this point they had been working together for about two weeks, and so when Yuugi sat down to get started, he did so with the confidence that he would be able to easily slip into his daily routine. Coding was tedious, and at times frustrating, but it was at least something that he could lose himself in, and the end product was always rewarding.

For the rest of the work day, that was how his day progressed, and the dour feeling that had affected him since that morning seemed to wane. He ended up eating lunch at his desk as planned, but that was as much to make up for the time he had missed by being late as it was because he was absorbed in his coding. As tedious and time-consuming as programming was, there was something of a rhythm to it. Yuugi had never considered himself a workaholic (much to his mother’s chagrin), but when game design was as much of a puzzle itself as the puzzles he ended up creating, he couldn’t help but get absorbed in it. It was work, but it was fun, too.

Or at least, it was fun until he reached one of the intermediary testing stages.

There were certain set stages in a game’s development in which Yuugi (or whoever was working on the game with him) ran tests to make sure the coding was correct—to make sure that everything ran as it was supposed to, error-free. The general rule of thumb was to run a quick test after completing a branch of coding and merging it back into the master branch so that errors, if there were any, could be caught immediately, before they caused more problems down the line. Yuugi was a bit more lax with his testing, as a general rule; he would run a quick test if the coding he had completed was particularly complicated, but if not, he tended to save his checks until he had completed a certain stage in the  _game_ , rather than just a particular branch of code. It was a bit reckless, he supposed, but on the other hand it felt wasteful to run a check after every single branch of code. It was much easier to test at predetermined checkpoints, rather than checking after every step.

That was how Yuugi felt, anyway, and that was what he had felt confident about doing until he decided to run his intermediary test at five thirty that evening, only to have the entire game crash the second he tried to run it.

For a moment, Yuugi stared at the screen, his mind struggling to process what had just happened. Then, feeling a little dazed and more than a little panicked, Yuugi rebooted the program, set the game into test mode . . . and watched as it promptly crashed again.

There was something wrong with the code. That much was obvious, but the particular crash he was witnessing (and did witness two more times as he tried in vain to get the game to test successfully, only to for it to crash harder than a car driving into a brick wall at ninety miles per hour) didn’t tell him  _what_ was wrong with the code, or where. It was five thirty p.m. on a Wednesday, he was supposed to have his portion of the beta coding done by Friday morning, and if the game crashed every time he opened it . . .

Yuugi put his face in his hands, held it for a moment, and then scrubbed his hands down his cheeks before he reached for his cell phone. He still had all of Thursday to work on it, but depending on how much he had to fix, Thursday might not be good enough—at the very least, it wouldn’t be if he had to spend Thursday morning trying to figure out what was causing the crash. He had to stay to figure it out, and that meant texting Katsuya to let him know that he would be home late—how late, Yuugi didn’t entirely know, but at this point in his career it wasn’t like either of them was a stranger to the fact that he sometimes had to work ten or eleven hour days.

As it turned out, finding the error in the code that was causing the error to crash wasn’t the problem—the problem was fixing it, because the error was in some of the base code in the master branch, and had somehow gone unnoticed by Yuugi and every other member on his team as they branched off other pieces of the coding to build the game around the base (and therefore, the error). Yuugi was an adult, and he hadn’t cried out of frustration in what felt like a good number of years, but in that moment he almost wanted to. He wasn’t sure which one of them had caused that error, but what he did know was at that point it didn’t matter. Even if he fixed that one little error, all that would do was cause five more bugs to pop up in its place, like a Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon on steroids. He would have to start over. All of the work he had done that day—or at least all of the coding that he had worked on since lunch at the latest—would have to be scrapped and built from the ground up again, once he fixed the initial error in the master branch.

Yuugi looked at the clock, and—after assuring Katsuya via text that he’d grab some of the instant noodles they kept in the office kitchen for nights like this one so that he didn’t starve—set to work.

Yuugi couldn’t rewrite all of his code that night, but he felt (or tried to convince himself, anyway) that he had made a decent start by the time the clock struck eight. Before he left he shot an e-mail to the rest of his team to let them know what had happened (and actively tried to not feel aggravated at the fact that none of  _them_ had stayed later to work on it), and once that was done, he tried to push it out of his mind—tried not to think about the mountain of work that would be waiting for him the next morning, or how there was a significant chance his team was going to end up spending more time arguing over who caused the error than spending the time to fix it.

When he finally made it home (a commute that took an extra fifteen minutes due to his usual train  _still_ undergoing maintenance) it was to find Katsuya sprawled out on the couch as he played a game on his laptop, some action movie blaring on the TV. Katsuya looked up when Yuugi entered, and smiled as he said, “Hey, welcome home.”

“Thanks,” Yuugi said, but he couldn’t muster the energy to really smile back.

Katsuya noticed, as he always did, and his smile became more sympathetic. “Really rough day, huh? Did you figure out what was screwing up your code?”

“Yeah. I . . . don’t really want to talk about it,” Yuugi said. He had kicked off his shoes by the door, and after he dropped his laptop case off on one of the chairs by the bar counter, he headed for their bedroom. “I’m going to get changed.”

“Okay,” Katsuya said. His tone was as light as it ever was, and Yuugi knew that there was no way Katsuya would ever be put-out or hurt by Yuugi saying something like that after a bad day, but even as he knew that, he still felt a bit bad as he tugged off his work vest.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to  _talk_  to Katsuya _,_ but more that he didn’t want to talk about work in specific. Work was abysmal that day, and the last thing Yuugi wanted to do was think about how likely it was that it was going to be rough the next day, too—how likely it was that he wasn’t going to meet his Friday deadline at this rate. Yuugi crumpled his work vest in a ball and chucked it at the clothes hamper with more vehemence than strictly necessary, as if it was his vest’s fault that his day had been awful. Maybe talking about it could help a little, but after everything that happened, Yuugi didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like  _thinking_ , and certainly not about work. Katsuya cared, and Yuugi knew and appreciated that, but right then, all Yuugi wanted to do was not think, and also relax. That was all he wanted, and changing into sleep clothes was the first step.

Yuugi didn’t mind his work clothes, really (at least, not that much), but he could only relax to a certain point when confined in a button-down shirt, vest, and slacks. The moment he had stripped free of them and tossed them over to the clothes hamper (clothing exile, as he considered it—Ganon’s Castle, really, for how little he ever wanted to go over to that corner of the room) he started to feel a bit better, and pulling on one of Katsuya’s old  _Rurouni Kenshin_ t-shirts and a pair of his own too-long pajama pants just helped even more. (For no matter how hard Yuugi looked, it was damn difficult to find pajama pants in his size that  _didn’t_ drag on the floor. No matter how much Katsuya laughed, Yuugi maintained that it was not his fault pajama manufacturers designed their pants with sasquatches in mind.) He still felt beyond exhausted and mentally run down, but now that he was dressed in more comfortable clothing, Yuugi could already feel some of the stress melting out of him. He already felt a tiny bit better.

When he exited the bedroom Katsuya was making something in the kitchen, his laptop still open on the coffee table. Yuugi shuffled over to the couch and dropped onto the cushions, and after watching the movie for a couple seconds without really processing what was happening in it, he asked, “Hey, were you watching this?”

“Nah, not really,” Katsuya called over his shoulder. “You can change it if you want. I just had it on for background noise.”

“‘Kay.” Yuugi swiped the television remote from the table to flip through the channels. Nothing really felt appealing; there were a couple of romcoms he was sure they could laugh at, a romantic drama on one channel that Yuugi was sure they would start out laughing at and then somehow get invested in (a secret they would take with them to their graves), a horror movie he knew within the first thirty seconds Katsuya would hate, and several sports recap talk shows (because, Yuugi supposed, they somehow needed more than one). Finally, in lieu of anything else better to watch, Yuugi settled on a rerun of  _Detective Conan,_ tossing the remote back on the coffee table before he let himself sink back into the couch cushions. If nothing else, at least  _Detective Conan_ would allow him to not think about anything for a couple of hours before bed.  

Katsuya returned to the couch after a few minutes, and when he did, he set something down on the coffee table before he flopped back onto the cushions and reached for his laptop again. Yuugi spared the mug on the table only a half-second glance at first, but when his brain registered what it was he saw, he did a double take.

Given that they were both in a relationship and lived together, he and Katsuya shared just about all of their dishes. But even though their dishes were, well,  _their_ dishes, each one of them had certain mugs that only one of them ever used. Katsuya, for instance, was the only one to ever use the mug with the Scapegoats on it, given that Shizuka had gotten it for him as a gift. Yuugi  _could_ have used it, he knew, and Katsuya wouldn’t have cared, but he always left it in the cabinet in case Katsuya wanted to use it later, because that one in particular was  _his_ more than it was  _theirs_. Similarly, Yuugi had a mug with a Bulbasaur pattern on it that he had picked up the last time they went to the Pokémon Center in Osaka, and that was the mug that Katsuya had set on the coffee table. Not one of the many shared mugs they had, and not one of his own mugs, but Yuugi’s Bulbasaur mug. It was closer to Yuugi’s position on the couch as well—much closer to Yuugi than it was to Katsuya, despite the fact that Katsuya was the one who had brought it in.

Yuugi glanced over at Katsuya, but Katsuya had gotten re-absorbed into whatever game he was playing on his laptop, sprawled back on the sofa cushions with his computer on his stomach. Yuugi sat up and picked the mug up off the table, the ceramic pleasantly warm between his hands, and the scent of mint chocolate hit him almost instantly. Peppermint hot cocoa, topped off with five marshmallows, exactly the way he liked it.

For the second time that day, Yuugi felt like crying. But this time a smile—unbidden but welcome—split his cheeks instead, and after taking a sip of his cocoa (and it was amazing, really, how it warmed him from the inside out), he scooted over so he could gently bump his shoulder against Katsuya’s.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for,” Katsuya said airily. “I didn’t really do anything. But . . .” He looked over at Yuugi, and when he caught sight of Yuugi’s smile, grinned himself. “You’re welcome anyway, I guess.”

Yuugi snorted. “You guess,” he said. Katsuya’s cheeky grin didn’t fade, and—perhaps because of that, perhaps because of the peppermint hot cocoa in his hands, or perhaps because, despite the day he suffered, everything in  _that moment_ felt perfect—neither did Yuugi’s. Instead, he curled up against Katsuya’s side, and Katsuya automatically shifted so that he had one arm around Yuugi’s shoulders. That was how they spent the rest of the night, and though conversation was minimal (it was mostly just occasional commentary on the  _Detective Conan_ episodes they were watching, or Yuugi offering bits of advice here and there for the game Katsuya was playing), it was comfortable—soothing, even. After everything that had happened, Yuugi thought that a quiet night spent curled up on the sofa with Katsuya was exactly what he needed.

He took another sip from his hot cocoa, and smiled around the rim of his mug.

Yeah, maybe the day wasn’t completely awful after all.


End file.
